The United States’ affordable care crisis and chronic physician shortage have required nurse practitioners to assume increasingly important roles in the healthcare system. Nurse practitioners can address critical access-to-care problems, provide safe and effective care, and lower the cost of care. However, restrictive occupational licensing laws — specifically, scope-of-practice laws — have limited their ability to care for patients. Spurred by interest groups opposed to allowing nurse practitioners to practice independently, states require physician supervision of nurse practitioners. Research has discredited many of the traditional reasons for these restrictive laws, but emerging arguments assert that independent practice will deepen the ongoing opioid crisis by allowing unsupervised nurse practitioners to overprescribe opioids. The opioid crisis has become one of the defining public health emergency of this generation, so these arguments warrant serious investigation. If granting nurse practitioners independence will exacerbate the opioid epidemic, restricting their practices may be justified despite the clear benefits that independence could create for patients and the healthcare system.